From a low pressure sales perspective the community should be phrasing it as questions that make the Windows user think about.
Even aside from this, I think the bigger issue is that Linux evangelists need to be open to new/ignorant users, and casual users. So much of the Linux community is made up of die-hards who expect other users to be just as invested in it as they are. For example, I’ve tried Linux twice, and both times ran into issues with support for hardware (audio issues the first time, lack of support for my mouse the second). In both cases, I have a significant number of people making absurd suggestions, and expecting me to devote significant amounts of work or money to make my PC functional when I already had a functional OS. Comments to the point of, “just buy new hardware,” “just program the drivers yourself,” or “just hire someone to write the software for you.” were a significant part of the response. Unless Linux is my job or my hobby, these are not realisitc suggestions, and they make Linux look like a nerdy hobby rather than a Windows competitor.
Yeah Linux users can be like overzealous sport parents.
Side note if you do run into hardware issues that is not as simple as installing a package, my suggestion is try another distro. And I have had zealous users get mad at this, but I went through the same situation. I have a 2010 laptop it would not run any Debian based distro or offshoots, and I tried 8-10. They all fail during install with error, or install then and fail to boot with bios/hardware bug. So I tried Fedora and OpenSuSE and those had no problems (rpm based). So whatever was in Debian mainline and trickle down could not deal with the bug. But Fedora and SUSE gave a warning of “BIOS bug, working around it” and boot fine. Oddly enough NixOS works also.
When I described this before, I did have a slew of people saying “you just don’t know what your doing”, or " Debian isn’t the issue here". Lol. Clearly I know enough to attempt 12 or more Linux installs, and having no Debian distros work does mean Debian is the issue.
Even aside from this, I think the bigger issue is that Linux evangelists need to be open to new/ignorant users, and casual users. So much of the Linux community is made up of die-hards who expect other users to be just as invested in it as they are. For example, I’ve tried Linux twice, and both times ran into issues with support for hardware (audio issues the first time, lack of support for my mouse the second). In both cases, I have a significant number of people making absurd suggestions, and expecting me to devote significant amounts of work or money to make my PC functional when I already had a functional OS. Comments to the point of, “just buy new hardware,” “just program the drivers yourself,” or “just hire someone to write the software for you.” were a significant part of the response. Unless Linux is my job or my hobby, these are not realisitc suggestions, and they make Linux look like a nerdy hobby rather than a Windows competitor.
Those are all terrible suggestions lol.
Yeah Linux users can be like overzealous sport parents.
Side note if you do run into hardware issues that is not as simple as installing a package, my suggestion is try another distro. And I have had zealous users get mad at this, but I went through the same situation. I have a 2010 laptop it would not run any Debian based distro or offshoots, and I tried 8-10. They all fail during install with error, or install then and fail to boot with bios/hardware bug. So I tried Fedora and OpenSuSE and those had no problems (rpm based). So whatever was in Debian mainline and trickle down could not deal with the bug. But Fedora and SUSE gave a warning of “BIOS bug, working around it” and boot fine. Oddly enough NixOS works also.
When I described this before, I did have a slew of people saying “you just don’t know what your doing”, or " Debian isn’t the issue here". Lol. Clearly I know enough to attempt 12 or more Linux installs, and having no Debian distros work does mean Debian is the issue.
People.